In many environments and operational circumstances in which switches (or switching devices) are present, the statuses of the switches can be of importance or of interest for any of a variety of reasons. For example, in automotive systems, control actions sometimes should be taken based at least in part upon whether a switch is open or closed. At the same time, determining the status of a given switch commonly can involve providing a current toward the switch and sensing whether some parameter dependent upon the open or closed status of the switch has a particular characteristic or varies in a particular manner. Yet such a manner of determining the status of a switch can involve significant power usage and, in systems such as automotive systems where such power can be provided from a battery, result in depletion of the battery.
Again for example with respect to automotive systems, in order to reduce the amount of power usage associated with determining the statuses of switches, testing can be performed in an intermittent manner—e.g., the statuses of the switches can be periodically sampled. Further for example, in some conventional arrangements, an integrated circuit that is performing the testing is usually in a low power mode (LPM) with the car engine off, but periodically awakens to poll switches to determine their statuses, and more particularly to determine if any switch has changed state (e.g., due to a door handle being activated). Even though such arrangements permit determining of the statuses of switches in a manner that involves a limited amount of current flow and corresponding power usage, such arrangements still entail undesirably high levels of power usage. For these and/or other reasons it would be advantageous if improved systems or methods for switch status detection could be developed.